DRM To The Disaster Again... May Prevent 3D Showing Of Avatar In Some Theaters

from the just-what-they-wanted dept

There's obvious been a lot of talk about James Cameron's new epic movie Avatar. One of the interesting things about the movie is that, yet again, it's showing why Hollywood probably isn't in as much trouble due to "piracy" as studio bosses keep insisting. Avatar is designed to be the type of movie you absolutely want to go see in the theater, with amazing special effects, and an incredible 3D setup, like none you've ever seen before, and certainly one that you can't replicate at your house, no matter how cool your home theater system might be. And yet... it seems that they've still decided to lock the movie up with DRM, and rather than helping things, that DRM is fouling stuff up. Some theaters in Germany have discovered that the DRM is preventing them from showing the film in some theaters. So, here they are, with a movie that, by its very nature, is resistant to any problem from "piracy" (if anything, pirated copies might make people more interested in seeing the amazing effects), and they still try to DRM it up, and all that does is make it harder to see the special effects. So, what good does DRM do again?

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This was a problem for a single advance showing at a single theater, since resolved.

Good to hear.

How exactly is this news worthy?

It's yet another example of pointless DRM interfering with legitimate uses for no good reason. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I tried to make that clear.

Other than that, I'm curious why you always feel the need to curse in your comments on this site. It's a pretty sure sign that you don't have a very strong argument and you have to lash out at those who disagree with you, but who you cannot respond to with logic and a real argument.

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This guy is obviously a douchebag, but complaining about cursing in a comment? And the "curse" was the word "bullshit"???

Fuck you. I had no idea you fostered contempt for those who use a little color in their language.

I can imagine you feel prevented from using colorful language in your responses because this is your site, and you have to maintain a certain level of professionalism, but lay off the rest of us dude; we don't have the same mandate.

My advice? Stick to the facts and skip that last paragraph. Doing so makes him look stupid and you look... not.

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You know, about once every few years, I have to replace the pad lock on my outside shed because it rusts up and stops working. The day it stops working, I curse at it because it isn't working. Then I think that probably more than once it has kept someone from stealing stuff out of my yard or kept someone's kid from getting hurt, and I remember why I had a padlock on there.

Mike, everything has occassional failures. It takes a true hater to ignore everything else that happens and only call attention to it when there is a failure.

How many cimemas do you think showed Avatar 3D last night? How many did so without a blink? What is the failure rate? I suspect the failure rate is lower than you own on this blog. Should you mock yourself more often as a result?

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"Mike, everything has occassional failures. It takes a true hater to ignore everything else that happens and only call attention to it when there is a failure."

Is that why you dive into every thread here to attack Mike?

It's a simple concept that Mike's stating, let's see if you can follow. The only purpose behind DRM is to remove your rights to content that you've legally paid for, on the pretence that you might be a "pirate". Be it regional controls, blocks on which devices you can copy your music to or read your eBooks on, DRM only ever affects legal customers. It NEVER stops "piracy" - all DRM can be cracked, and those downloading illegally will get the non-DRM copy. Only legal customers suffer from DRM restrictions.

Here, we have a perfect example of this happening. An entire screen full of paying customers were denied the experience they had legally paid for. Those who stayed at home and pirated the movie instead were not affected. It's not an isolated incident, but a side-effect of the very nature of DRM. You can call me a DRM hater - I have never, and never will purchase DRM-infected digital content for reasons of both practicality and principle - but you're not really refuting the points by saying "oh, only ONE cinema full of people were affected so it doesn't matter". I'd like to bet that no "pirates" were affected.

As for your idiotic shed analogy - you are legally allowed to replace the lock on your shed and access your own property within. Thanks to the DMCA, if your digital DRM fails, you've lost everything you paid for. You really don't see the difference, and the problem with this?

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Is that why you dive into every thread here to attack Mike?

Mike tries very hard to stretch things out, to make things look worse than they are. Avatar was shown to something like 300,000 people in it's opening shows ($3 million take, average $10 a ticket), and perhaps 400 people didn't get to see the movie right away because of a technical issue. Failure rate so small that it is almost not worth noting, unless you are desperately trying to slam DRM.

DRM isn't the best solution, nobody says it is. But if I am premiering a brand new $300 million dollar digital movie all over the place, you gotta think that they are going to have some sort of protection, rather than making it easy for some reel jockey to just copy it and dump it on the internet directly in it's full digital glory. You would have to be totally moronic to think otherwise. This isn't consumer DRM, this is a company protecting it's investment.

you're not really refuting the points by saying "oh, only ONE cinema full of people were affected so it doesn't matter". I'd like to bet that no "pirates" were affected.

I am betting that if the movie was sent to theaters in digital format without any protection that there would be a full digital copy online right now. Instead, all there are is cam rips, nothing more. So I would say that yes, some pirates were certainly affected.

As it is, where is the moral outrage about the cam rips themselves? Isn't it stupid that TPB has a number of them up there today? Is this obvious thieving something that Mike should be upset about? He gets all up in arms about people getting in trouble for having cameras in movie theaters, and yet he doesn't mention stuff like this.

More and more techdirt is becoming a one sided slam job, I just hope to open some eyes and get people like you to stop sipping the koolaid long enough to realize that there are two sides to almost every story, and Mike is only telling you one.

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Well, I assume the accountants are happier when knowing that they have "spend 10 million preventing piracy" than hearing that "piracy may or may not have cost them between 1 and 2 million, with a chance that it actually helped them make money instead". They don't really know how to put that in the books.

Buy a DRM product you don't "own" it and severely limited depending on the DRM in play... copy a DRM liberated product you own it. You can convert to a different file type, display it to any media output device you want assuming the media device isn't incredibly locked down, use it as long as you care to, what else am i missing?

I am as anti-DRM as the next guy, but the encryption and rights management built into D-cinema motion picture distribution is actually a benefit to all involved.

The National Association of Theatre Owners publishes a set of Digital Cinema System Requirements that address equipment interoperability and compatibility. If some theatre in buttfuck nowhere can't unlock their copy of Avatar, they are either not following the standards or they are not legally allowed to screen the movie at that time.

D-cinema distribution allows digitally perfect copies of films to be distributed to theatres on $60 hard drives instead of $2000-$5000 film prints. Each time a D-cinema package is projected, it 'phones home' to ensure that the particular theatre is authorized to project that film at that time. This enables studios to control when films are released in various markets, to accurately bill exhibitors only for the number of actual screenings, and (presumably) to watermark each screening to track piracy. If a copy is lost or stolen they can simply disable that copy.

D-cinema DRM is not at all comparable to the horrendous controls people try to place on consumer media. Digital theatres invest in millions of dollars worth of gear to project digital movies and DRM has been part of it from the beginning. In fact, D-cinema encryption is probably the only reason digital exhibition is allowed by the studios to exist. This is not some poor schmuck who can't watch his iTunes movie because he isn't connected to the Internet. Digital cinema systems are designed from the ground up to be rights managed and net-connected.

For moviegoers, D-cinema allows us to see films with the picture quality and sound the creators intended, to always view a perfect 'print' without scratches and sound pops, and to (maybe someday) benefit from the reduced costs to theatres and distributors.

D-cinema and the DCI Standard are examples of DRM with a purpose and it works very well.

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"D-cinema distribution allows digitally perfect copies of films to be distributed to theatres on $60 hard drives instead of $2000-$5000 film prints."

This makes no sense. Certainly it's perfectly possible -- easier, even, to put the film on a hard drive without involving DRM. So DRM doesn't "allow" that.

"Each time a D-cinema package is projected, it 'phones home' to ensure that the particular theatre is authorized to project that film at that time."

Sounds like the kind of scheme that could be broken pretty easily, if anyone cared to do so. So this probably has all the same issues as every other kind of DRM. I see nothing about this that makes it a "better" DRM.

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"(Am I the only one who thinks that Avatar looks like a truly horrible movie?)"

No, from the sounds of it, it's a Sci-Fi B-Movie (like the ones you see during the day on Syfy) with a $500,000,000 budget. The reviews I've been hearing about it say that the first two hours of the movie are complete crap but are made up for in the last 40 min.

My question about the DRM is what happens when the internet connection goes out? I can hear AC now "that's why you pay for a dedicated internet connection". They do go out, and more often than you think. What, is a movie theater going to cancel a showing because their FiOs line got cut by an overzealous gardener?

This DRM also hasn't stopped a single movie from being pirated. I don't see how Avatar is going to be any different.

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"(Am I the only one who thinks that Avatar looks like a truly horrible movie?)"

No, you aren't. I have a fairly good method for predicting the worth of a movie, though it's certainly not fool proof:

When the previews for a new movie come out, pay close attention. If the commercials for the movie use the same three or four clips in the previews and adverts over and over and over again, without multiple commercials featuring multiple groupings of clips, you've likely got a stinker on your hands.

This method saved me from "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell", both Terminator movies after the second one, Wolverine, and "Funny People".

On the other hand, it got me to watch "The Hangover" and will get me to go to the theatre for Sherlock Holmes....

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Your oh so great DRM sounds like a huge waste of money to me. Maybe if they removed all that pointless DRM they could save money on equipment and then lower the price on concessions. Prices are so high I never buy anything.
DRM, no matter how you look at it, only makes sense to those who are blinded by the thought of control.

It is very simple, if it is digital, it will be copied. Simple as that. Why waste money trying to stop it?

Good to hear

I only wish it preventing the movies release on a larger scale. Unlike others I hope the movie and music industries fail. Bands will start releasing their music online without large record companies getting in the way of their sales. movie makers will have to dare I say compete in a world market with asian counties that get their movies out for free.

Talk about over hyping a story! Mike, you are truly a classic hater at times.

The complex DRM system, which involves several certificates and server-delivered time-sensitive keys for hard drives and projectors, failed in a way consistent with the movie’s epic status. Unfortunately, after working for several hours cinema workers failed to decrypt 150 gigabytes of data, which resulted in at least one location reverting back to the 2D version

OH NOES! 1 theater had to play it in 2D instead of 3D! Oh NOES! DRM is so bad, it disrupted, what, 400 people?

Please Mike, this is another post where you show that you really do massively slant stories.

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If I pay to see it in 3D (and it does cost more for that option), and the theater can't even get it to play in the proper format? I'm getting my money back and suggesting people go elsewhere. So... your 400 inconvenienced movie-goers are now 400 word-of-mouth bad reviews of the theater, itself. Word of mouth advertising is stronger than any other form (so says study after study), so... was it really that big a deal?

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"Unfortunately, after working for several hours cinema workers failed to decrypt 150 gigabytes of data, which resulted in at least one location reverting back to the 2D version"

Holy shit, not only do these people have to depend on an internet connection to authorize the playback but they need mainframes to decode the data in the vary small window they have? And all to (not) stop piracy. No wonder ticket prices are too damn high.

While Mike is very biased, and this isn't really a "disaster" as it's only one theatre, he is still right this time.

Avatar was literally a movie impervious to pirating. You could've removed DRM from it, and I guaruntee the only difference would've been those 400 people in Germany getting to see the movie as they paid for. Pirating of it would not increase.

This is beasic economics. James Cameron made a product that people were willing to pay for, plain and simple. Sure, without DRM there would've been an exact digital copy of Avatar floating the internet the day it came out, or even before that, but who has the 3D monitor/TV to play it? No one. Well, maybe they could've just gone out and bought the glasses for it? If they are willing to go that far so see that movie pirated in 3D at home, I doubt they would've paid for the movie to begin with, and probably watched the ham handed home video version on the internet anyways. And additionally, what's the point of pirating if you're going to pay for the glasses, it is no longer free.

Not to mention the size of the screen and the effects obviously mattered to people, or they wouldn't pay 3-10 dollars extra for a 3D ticket in IMAX. Nor would they see the movie numerous times, which I have as have some friends of mine.

DRM normally for movies is arguably necessary, but for Avatar, there is no such excuse.

As it has been said many times, make a product people think is worth it, and they will pay for it.